Last week was a rough week for LastPass. In his continuing work of scrutinizing security products in general, and recently password managers in particular, Tavis Ormandy has released a series of critical bugs against LastPass (Tweet, Writeups). They’re exactly the sort of nightmare scenario that scares the crap out of users adopting password managers, and especially cloud-connected ones. However, it’s too easy and too simplistic to look at this week and conclude anything sweeping about password managers.

Don’t Lose Sight of the Big Picture

Password managers are a hugely important measure for most people, and something that all information security professionals should be advocating for. It’s not necessarily an easy sell, so it really pisses me off when I see self-professed experts muddying the waters with security absolutism (phrases like “well a hacker could still do…”, or advocating pet approaches that are infeasible for most people). When a vulnerability like this comes around, it provides another opportunity for those sorts of folks to shout and snark and win some personal points, at the expense of laymen who don’t have the ability to put these histrionics in context. So, even if these issues were a death knell for LastPass (I don’t believe they are, but more on that below), then password managers would *still* be a good idea for nearly everyone.

One important-but-often-overlooked benefit of password managers is that it conditions users to emphasize specific passwords less and be more comfortable with the abstract idea of authenticating to a service using some intermediary. That forms one part of the bridge (along with the spread of federated auth and mobile push authentication, among others) toward a post-password future.

So, 3 bad vulns in LastPass, but the concept of password managers is still a net positive for security. How do we reconcile those?

I would argue that although the severity of the vulnerabilities were “critical”, the actual risk was relatively low for most users. By the time most people became aware of the issues, they had already been fixed or patched and effective for anyone who was online to receive the update. I don’t have metrics on how long it too the patch to be actually deployed to users, but my browser picked it up before I even got finished reading the published disclosure. For highly-targeted users, that might be enough time to put together an attack, but for the vast majority of the population they had a fix before they needed to care. A non-browser based manager is an option that avoids some of these issues, but I rarely meet a person using one who’s not in infosec already.

For the rest of users, they continued to realize all of the risk-reduction benefits of a password manager (in addition to convenience, etc), and never actually realized significant risk from the vulnerability.

Planning for Failure

There’s a longer blogpost here about the significant attack surface of a browser, defense in depth, and security configuration decisions around that, but that’ll have to be another time.

At the moment, I just want to point out LastPass’s ability to respond to a bug submission, triage it, then develop and deploy and appropriate fix in in time to limit user impact is not luck or accident; I would argue that it speaks to internal engineering values, and that it’s table stakes for a modern software shop, *especially* in security software. Even while he was hammering on them, Tavis pointed out that their responsiveness is a better experience than he’s used to having with vendors. One of the most controversial points in my BlackHat talk from a few years ago was congratulating WordPress on their approach to automatic updates; while it’s easy to dump on the project as a poster child for security vulns, in practice their effort in automatic updates actually do more to keep their users safe than some other projects with fewer bugs.

Final Thoughts

They got beat up pretty bad, but I’ll continue to use LastPass. We don’t often get to see in a very public way how a company handles a security issue, but when the response shows us that they’re thinking and doing the right things both before and during (Lastpass 2015, Kickstarter 2014), then it helps with the decision about whether to continue using them.